Which Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Approach Optimizes Customer Engagement Behavior? The Role of Customer-brand Identification, Brand Love, and Social Communication

Abstract

The effectiveness of CSR in yielding favorable customer-based outcomes has been drawn into question, as many CSR activities have failed to deliver positive (e.g., engagement-based/relational) results, yielding an important literature-based tension. In parallel, the effectiveness of firms’ or brands’ communication of their CSR activities (e.g., on social communication channels) remains tenuous, exposing a related gap in the literature. Addressing these gaps, we posit that different (i.e., proactive vs. reactive) CSR activities may hold differing levels of value to brands and that the brand’s social communication of its CSR activities may differentially impact its respective CSR activities. Firms may concurrently adopt proactive and reactive CSR activities, which we term chiefly proactive (chiefly reactive) CSR, respectively. We then develop a model that proposes unique impacts of a firm’s chiefly proactive (vs. chiefly reactive) CSR activities in terms of their respective capacity to generate positive customer engagement behavior. The findings, indeed, corroborate a differing impact of chiefly proactive (vs. chiefly reactive) CSR approaches, with chiefly proactive CSR proving particularly effective in driving customers’ positive relational and engagement outcomes. We also uncover the critical role of social communication in enabling chiefly proactive CSR activities, in particular.